I don't have it in me right now to do any fancy modeling (I am still too angry) but I did upload the data into Wolfram Alpha. I've blogged before about Alpha, which is a great tool. If you upgrade to a pro subscription (I am not a salesman... I do find the upgrade to be a little pricey) you can access even more convenient features, like uploading data sets and such. This is what I did with the marriage amendment data. I didn't even know what I wanted to do with the data, so I simply typed the name of my data set as the query, and Alpha decided on all kinds of analyses to spit back out at me. Here is some of it. I guess that if there is a pedagogical point here, it's that the way a quantitative modeler often gets started is just by plotting things.

Here's a geographic heat map where the shading corresponds to the fraction of votes supporting a discriminatory measure in a given state. The reason Nevada shows up as over 100% is that there were two votes in Nevada, one in 2000 and one in 2002 (each one receiving in the high 60%'s range). At any rate, I don't see too much structure in this map.

Here's a histogram of the years in which the discriminatory amendments passed.

You can see that 2004/05 were busy years. Here's what I think are the most interesting plots, namely a histogram of the discriminatory vote percentage and a distribution fit (which you can get a feel for via the quantile plot on the right). Alpha finds that the best fit distribution is uniform.

I am not yet sure what I want to do with any of this, but it at least lets me start trying (perhaps in vain) to make sense of the hate in this country.